Introduction and Prologue: The End of Total War?

Abstract

In the intoxicating days of the late 1980s following the passing of the Cold War, the term security became a buzzword for every analyst who wanted to appear postmodern. In this study we define security as consisting of two basic categories: hard security and soft security. Hard security relates to the fear of external armed attack against the landmass and national sovereignty, and soft security issues relate to the ‘lower’ level threats to national interests arising from inter alia the collapse of democratic forms of government, international crime, mass migration, poverty and social problems which could exacerbate anxieties about personal security. The current security threat is the fear of genocide or the process of ethnic expulsion.